For Everyone's attention!!

[alan s]

Just thought I'd advise all on here that I have just had a message arrive from Niek with a virus attached. It's the one doing the rounds at present & comes with no "recipients name" in that box on your e-mail 'INbox.'
It does however come with a title and usually on a subject that is a relevant matter...in this case "cleaning height correctors."
My Norton detected & deleted it, so Niek, looks like you've got your work cut out for you this weekend mate.
To zot it you can get a patch off the 'net at:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/av ... .tool.html
Until Niek gets back to us & let's us know he's again clean, just treat anything from him or anyone else, unsolicited, as suspect particularly with attachments, naturally.
Alan S

[russellfowden]

I work in IT and am pretty conversant with virus problems, you need to take the threats posed seriously as many viruses target not just your address book but can also scan your inbox for any EMAIL addresses which the virus will then despatch itself to. On my home machine I use a free antivirus app which you can download from www.grisoft.com - it's pretty good, just make sure you update it regularly. Use a bit of common sense and the package referenced above and you can avoid these issues.

[handman]

im not that good with this internet thing - but i thought setting a sesible firewall would prevent this sort of problem

[Niek]

Hi guys (girls??)
'Funny', I came in this morning (yeah I'm one of those people surfing on the bosses time <img src=icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>) I had the same message Alan is referring to in my mailbox. Except that the virus-scanner at work picked it up and only delivered a note stating it had found a virus and chucked the message. I've been getting messages like that for weeks now. So I'm sure my computer is not infected and have heard, as Russell says, that the bugbear virus will pick names out of an infected persons adress-book ans send viruses in their name to anyone else in the adres book..... But I'm no expert at this.
Just to be on the safe-side. I never send any messages to anyone directly, so if anyone were to receive anything with my name on it just delete it. (I type andyspares messages directly on the net)
Sorry to have caused inconvenience to anyone,
Niek.
ps: Alan I tried your link but 'the URL couldn't be retrieved'...

[Jon]

Niek is quite right.
The virus in question, Bugbear (and it really is) will just take a random email adddress from someones inbox/outbox/address book on an infected machine, and send an email to another random address that looks like its been sent from someone else. (if you follow me).
So a perfectly innocent party with a "clean" machine will then get people ringing or emailing them to say "you've sent me a virus" when infact the other person has done no such thing.
This is the URL for the removal tool if you have reason to believe that your machine is infected
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/av ... .list.html
then choose the bugbear removal tool.
In fact, its worth downloading and running the repair just to satisfy yourself that your PC is not infected.
Norton 2002 seems effective at dealing with this virus, as does AVG 6.0 from www.grisoft.com (see message from Russell, works great and its free if you are in the UK), Dr Solomans less so at the moment.
Jon Wood
IT Supervisor
GSF t/as Andyspares
Edited by - Jon on 16 Oct 2002 09:06:43

[vanny]

There is a nice little work around for this (under Outlook express) im not sure if it does work (no virus to check with) but should work for others. The virus uses the default address to send messages, so set up a dummy account (or one that can only be sent to and not from, such as a remote IMAP account) and set it to default, virus foiled
Vanny
Merseyside, UK
Citroenbx19rd@hotmail.com
http://www.bxproject.co.uk